


The Topography of Animals

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-06
Updated: 2013-05-06
Packaged: 2017-12-10 13:41:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/786674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jefferson, and Victor, and the pieces of their lives then and now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Topography of Animals

Jefferson walks in the woods, most days.

Realm-jumper. Charter of drumlins and kettle holes. His fingers precise as any surgeon's, crafting and defining boundaries in ink.

In his maps there are still empty stretches of terrain, and the topographic ribbons fray and buck against them - these gaps. Where Jefferson cannot or will not or has not, or does not mean, to go.

Some days he walks the periphery of his lines, as if he is the broad arc of a compass, anchored somewhere in the depths of this earth.

Some days he endeavors to explain the way the worlds align and brush and entangle with one another, and his hands - frantic now and shaking, his eyes alight, his skin translucent with some fever, grasp Victor's as if he can simply will the understanding through the heat of their blood beneath the skin.

Some days he lies still in bed and cannot be roused, like a pinned and gaping fish, caught between the lines of latitude chart the course of his mind. Entangled, then.

If their paths cross, if Victor is off-shift and Jefferson lies twitching and sweating and either out of his mind or so deeply within it - if, then, Victor sits with him, or climbs into his bed and holds him and what is madness after all but a losing of one's way, the shadows of a forest or the moon on the gates of a graveyard, or one long and desperate scramble, clawing up the walls of a rabbit hole.

...

Curses. Magic. Fairy-tales. Enchanted daggers. Ruined castles.

Victor woke from the dream of the dying soldier.

Who was not a soldier really. Not then. Not in the dewy morning damp, his mouth slackening, his eyes going blank, as if God had simply thumbed the soul out of them. There was the sky a brilliant blue, and the morning sun was already hot, fog rising off the fields, and the draft gelding pawing the earth and munching in a bored way at the new grass. It was springtime and the boy - not much older than Victor - who was just home on holiday - was dead in the dirt with blood seeping out the corners of his mouth and darkening the soft downy gray dust beneath him and the pretty girls were crying.

Gerhardt - 

\- was only a child.

(So was Victor, but at the age he fancied himself a man, thoughts of school and the university dancing closer)

Gerhardt had seen it. The gelding lurching, tossing, and the boy - showing off for the pretty girls who had shrieked and now recoiled in collective anguish - had been thrown and landed hard and cracked his head right open and now lay in the new spring sun, no longer the boy, no longer anything or anyone.

"Gerhardt," in his dream, crouching, he looked at his brother, "Gerhardt, go get father."

_Gerhardt._

He woke from the dream of the dying solider with the name of his brother on his lips and lay in bed as if he, too, had struck the earth and slipped his skin, and only now come back to it.

Gerhardt. Was Victor's brother. He was Victor.

The sturdy little dark haired boy with the bright, eager eyes was gone.

Victor had done that.

Victor lay in the dark in the on-call room at the hospital where he, the doctor, Doctor Whale, Victor, worked, where he remembered that he worked, had worked a long time.

Gerhardt was not a dream. How could he forget his little brother.

He lay in the dark a long time, until his pager buzzed at his belt, until he was called to lay his foolish, unskilled, prideful hands in the flesh of another, and bring them back from whatever brink they had been called to.

Victor had been a doctor and he was a doctor and he knew what he had done and what he could not do.

...

In the fifth year of the curse Jefferson had gone on a long walk along a particular ridge, some two-hundred yards from the narrow road that no one ever drove on, and, stepping wrong, slid and plunged hard down the embankment, slamming his leg into a tree.

The pain he felt then.

Was like nothing he had felt since waking in the curse, in his bed, remembering everything he was and everything this world was not, and since the second day when he woke again, checked every room of the house, and did not find his daughter.

That pain. Had crushed him in its grip. Became his bedmate. Ate into his blood. Scoured him.

His body hit the earth, his leg struck and jammed against the tree, and such agony shot into him, set his heart to galloping, got him gasping, crying, he _could not move_ and if there was any mercy in this world or any he would sprawl in the wet leaves and damp, loamy earth until some animal caught the scent of his blood, or simply until he gave up to want of food or water.

If there was mercy. His Grace would remain. Out of time. Without memory of him, their life, his wife, her mother.

In the fifth year of the curse at the bottom of an embankment with his leg shattered and hot, Jefferson lay all day and all night beneath the moon as narrow and delicate as one pale eyelash over a paler cheek, his wife, his daughter, the sky, the trees, the pain - 

He slept.

When he woke in the morning his leg was straight and true and the pain was gone and he could move easy and agile and he started at the sky each gasp growing greater and deeper in his chest until he heaved out a barking scream, until he sobbed without tears.

Jefferson stayed at the bottom of the embankment a long, long, long time.

He stopped caring how long. 

It did not matter.

After he climbed the ridge again he went back to his house and drew the fine-honed shears from his workshop across the veins that curled beneath the skin of his arm and bled. And bled. And bled. 

Until he passed out on the floor and woke up the next morning, with only a scar, as fine and sweet and pale as the moon in every night sky.

That was the fifth year.

...

It was a funny thing, to remember two lives.

All the things Victor thought he knew seemed to quiver as if perched on the edge of a fault line.

One day he sutured a small gash on the forehead of a pretty young girl, using the finest threads and tying them as tight and close as he could. She was alive. She was beautiful. He gave her a purple band-aid and a sticker with a kitten on it. 

Later he remembered the realm jumper.

How Jefferson had come to him once with a laceration over his eyebrow, bleeding down his face, and had not even noticed until Victor insisted on cleaning it up.

Jefferson explained that in the world of his birth, you packed a poultice onto a wound like that, bound it up, and either you did it right and it healed to a fine, proud scar, or you did it wrong and it suppurated and you either survived the fever or you didn't.

"What a line we walk," Jefferson had said, conversationally, while Victor bathed the wound in clear water and stitched it carefully back together. 

So close with him. Always that strange smell clinging to him, something like the air after a thunderstorm. Something like lightning. So close with him, and he was very handsome, and his eyes were very bright and clever and he wasn't at all like those stuffy fools at the university's medical college, no. Jefferson had eyes open to the world.

Later, Victor had introduced him to the microscope in his lab, delighted him with slides of leaves and insects and even a drop of blood.

"You have to come back," Victor had told him, when at last he had to let him return to his own world, trying to look very stern and serious, "so I can take the stitches out, when it heals up."

His mischievous eyes darting this way and that, Jefferson had stepped up to him forthrightly and kissed him, gently, on the mouth. 

Then spun his hat and leaped away to his own places and his own people.

The next time he'd come, some months later, he sat in Victor's lab on a high stool and said, "Do you know that I visited this place where every single human carried their soul around in an animal? They called them daemons. They thought _I_ was a ghost, or something, since I didn't have one. But I stayed there a few days and I woke up in the room I was staying in, all the doors and windows shut, and there was a raven sitting on the table. It spoke to me, even. Name was Peregris. Peregris, my daemon. Got any science for that, my friend?"

Victor wouldn't have believed a word Jefferson said except that it was Jefferson, and crazy as he was, he wasn't a liar.

(at least some strange and passionate part of his heart thought that if Jefferson had kissed him, Jefferson would not lie to him)

Sometimes, Victor knew, the crazier things seemed, ther more likely it just might mean they were true. With what he'd been studying, with what Jefferson had told him and shown him, so much was possible.

"Perhaps science is ... manifest, in different ways, in your other worlds." Victor hummed while he considered this. "If the worlds are like, you say, your boats, all together - but they are floating in the same ocean ... " He stared out the window, lost in thought, only startled when Jefferson's hands touched his shoulders.

"When I first saw one of them, it was a dog, I thought it was a pet and I thought I'd touch it, and they thought I was mad or a ghost or something evil, they told me about their daemons and how it's a rule you can't go touching someone else's soul without permission. It's - " Jefferson's hands steady and warm on his shoulders. " - it's very rude. What do you think your daemon might be?"

Victor hadn't thought and was having a very difficult time thinking with Jefferson touching him, now leaning closer, kissing the back of his neck. 

"I bet you'd be a cat."

"Cats don't like birds."

"Souls aren't animals."

"Aren't they?"

"Men are animals," Jefferson said, now into Victor's lips as he turned to face him. "Souls are different."

Victor took him to his bed, made love to him, was glad for his rooms high at the north wing of the house and far from any prying ears, so that he didn't have to stifle his cries, or Jefferson's.

 _Men are animals_ , Jefferson had said. And the sounds Victor drove from them both were rutting sounds, sweaty, frantic. 

_Souls are different,_ Victor remembered, walking up the steps to Jefferson's house.

Jefferson had stared at him in the doorway like someone waking from heavy anesthesia, skin pale, impeccably dressed, his beautiful, once-furious, once-lively eyes like the eyes of the boy, the soldier, in the dust, just before he died.

Victor was not sure who dragged whom to the floor, though he was pretty sure it was his foot kicking the door shut, and it was certainly Jefferson's hand knotted in his tie.

"It's been so long I broke my leg twice I did it on purpose the second time I was checking like you used to do like those experiments you wanted to see if it would happen again and again it happened again I broke it I cut myself open to look inside and see but there wasn't anything it just went away again sealed up you know just sealed right up and I did it again but it was like an eye that died and sank and rotted I broke my arm once and the bone came out and it hurt but I woke up in the morning and it was gone and do you remember, do you, do you remember, it's been so goddamn long - " 

Victor buried his face in Jefferson's shoulder, clutched him, _remembered_ him. 

Jefferson still smelled like lightning somehow.

It took four and a half days - in the kitchen, at the piano, in Jefferson's workshop, in the beautifully appointed observatory in the attic - for Jefferson to explain twenty-eight years of awareness, of waking, being reset, willed through a life that wasn't his and that he did not want.

On the second day Victor had caught a glimpse of the scar around Jefferson's neck. 

"Wonderland," Jefferson had said.

A long time ago in another life Jefferson had told him about Wonderland, too.

Victor touched the scar as he had touched any other on Jefferson's body. There were many new ones to remember. If Jefferson had come to him in the hospital he would have stitched him back up, dressed the wounds, given him antibiotics perhaps. 

And then the clock would have turned and Victor would have forgotten but Jefferson would have remembered.

...

There are those days when Jefferson looks at Victor with an expression like Gerhardt, after. Like the inmates of the asylum outside the city where Victor had taken his medical courses. Eyes in desperate pain and yearning.

And there are days - a few more, here and there - where Jefferson's eyes spark again.

Jefferson takes him walking on his favorite ridge. Shows him a view of the town, and the harbor. It is not his world. It is not Victor's world. But it is beautiful all the same, with the sun rising and the distant water like quicksilver in the dawn.

Victor meets Grace. He remembers her, when she was Paige. She has half the stickers, and she has the scar, so fine that only her father or a doctor's eye could see it.

Grace looks at her father sometimes, keenly, as if she is trying to discern some puzzle.

Victor often feels the same way.

**Author's Note:**

> There is a brief reference to the world of the "His Dark Materials" series by Philip Pullman, but didn't seem enough to warrant a crossover tag.


End file.
